Teachers as Curriculum Co-designers: Supporting Professional Learning and Curriculum Implementation in a CSforAll RPP Project

In this episode I unpack Ni et al.’s (2022) publication titled “Teachers as curriculum co-designers: Supporting professional learning and curriculum implementation in a CSforAll RPP project,” which shares results of an RPP where teachers collaboratively designed an app development curriculum that they implemented in their classrooms.

  • Celcome back to another episode of the

    csk8 podcast my name is jared o'leary

    each week of this podcast is either an

    interview with a guest or multiple

    guests or a solo episode where i unpack

    some scholarship in relation to computer

    science education in this week's episode

    i'm unpacking a paper titled teachers as

    curriculum co-designers colon supporting

    professional learning and curriculum

    implementation in a cs for all rpp

    project this paper was written by lee

    joon knee jillian bausch bernardo

    feliciano sin juan jesus and fred martin

    apologies if i mispronounce any names

    here's the app shack for this paper

    quote this paper examines the use of

    collaborative curriculum design

    co-design as a strategy for supporting

    teacher professional learning and the

    implementation of an inclusive middle

    school computer science and digital

    literacy csdl curriculum in three urban

    school districts the curriculum is

    focused on students developing mobile

    apps that provide social and community

    good the second year of the program has

    been dedicated to developing and

    piloting curriculum resources that

    support remote learning and culturally

    relevant pedagogy while the partner

    districts switch to remote and hybrid

    instructions this study explores

    teachers professional learning

    experiences in the collaborative design

    of curriculum materials and piloting the

    curriculum at their own classrooms the

    paper includes analysis of three data

    sets one co-design meeting notes and

    teacher reflections two semi-structured

    interviews with teachers who co-designed

    and piloted the curriculum three student

    pre and post survey responses on their

    attitude and interest in learning csdl

    preliminary results indicate that the

    co-design approach supplemented with

    one-on-one coaching has not only

    facilitated the curriculum development

    process but also fostered professional

    learning and collective capacity

    building for implementing the project

    curriculum in the partner districts

    findings from student surveys show that

    students perceive their understandings

    of and interest in computer science and

    creating apps were slightly improved

    regardless of gender end quote try to

    summarize this paper into a single

    sentence i say that this paper shares

    results of an rpp where teachers

    collaboratively designed an app

    development curriculum that they

    implemented in their classrooms as

    always you can find a link to this paper

    in the show notes as well as links to

    the author google scholar profile so you

    can check out more works by them you can

    find that in the description of the app

    that you're listening to this on or by

    going to jaredaleri.com and clicking on

    the podcast tab you'll notice that this

    podcast is powered by bootup which is

    the non-profit that i work for check out

    the curriculum that i create 100 free or

    check out the professional development

    you want to learn more about that at

    boot up pd.org all right so an rpp is a

    research practitioner partnership or

    research practice partnership or to

    frame both ways and this was between

    university of massachusetts at lowell

    university at albany and then three

    urban school districts in massachusetts

    and new york so this project actually

    started in the 2019-2020 school year

    which we probably all know what happened

    at the end of that school year so it

    disrupted some things the research

    questions for this particular study were

    quote one how did the project teachers

    implement the co-design curriculum in

    their own classrooms two how does the

    co-design process foster teacher

    professional learning and curriculum

    implementation three what are the

    student learning outcomes such as their

    interests and confidence in creating

    apps and learning computer science

    overall end quote from page two all

    right so the next section is on the

    background and so in this the very first

    subsection they talk about the

    curriculum co-design so it's a

    team-based process where teachers

    researchers developers iterates through

    cycles of design implementation testing

    redesign etc to develop curriculum

    materials so rather than having an

    external organization or researchers

    create content for the teachers the

    teachers were a part of the process so

    that way they could come come back and

    be like yo this actually won't work well

    because of x y and z variables here's

    what we should do instead and kind of

    design that into it and because they

    keep going back to this process they're

    able to iterate over time which is a

    good idea so to help with this out they

    did co-design meetings which were

    bi-weekly meetings where members of the

    rpp team could kind of get feedback talk

    to each other they also had one-on-one

    meetings which was an interesting idea

    so like a researcher would meet with the

    teacher one-on-one to get some feedback

    and when designing the curriculum they

    specifically focused on embedding

    culturally relevant pedagogies into the

    curriculum design itself and then they

    had ongoing discussions about supporting

    the curriculum implementation so once

    you design it you go back and you

    actually teach it go oh wait a minute

    what we thought was going to work really

    well maybe it did or maybe it didn't

    here's what we should change to make it

    even better so on page three of the

    paper the authors describe the overall

    curriculum so it's broken down into five

    units the first unit is on why computer

    science cs4 so this has modules that

    focus on apps for social good cs for all

    in app lab writing your first computer

    program computer science vocabulary and

    concepts and then it had an activity

    when it was an unplugged activity the

    second unit was on why apps matter and

    how to make them and so this used app

    lab button creation problem solving app

    research project and then it had an

    activity that was a speaker visit and a

    second activity that was another

    unplugged activity in unit 3 this one

    was on guided exploration with apps

    learning basic csdl skills and concepts

    and so it had modules on pair

    programming

    introduction to variables building an

    app multi-screen app debugging and had

    an activity that was on career in

    computer science and then another

    activity it was an unplugged activity in

    unit 4 this was on more apps modifying

    apps and learning more cs had modules on

    conditionals app interactivity functions

    and then an unplugged activity and then

    unit 5 was app completion and

    presentation so this had modules that

    was app completion and showcase and then

    a reflection and an assessment now in

    this table they also include alignment

    with massachusetts and new york csdl

    learning standards so if you're curious

    how those align check those out in that

    table on page three okay so the third

    main section of this paper is on data

    collection and analysis so they had

    meeting notes and teacher reflections

    from the meetings they had

    semi-structured interviews with the

    teachers and they had student pre and

    post survey responses so here are the

    results implementation so

    obviously covid impacted things this was

    originally designed before covid so this

    impacted how much time teachers had to

    be able to implement things teachers had

    full autonomy in terms of how they

    adapted and piloted the curriculum so

    they could go in order they could change

    some things etc they were encouraged to

    remix the materials so not every teacher

    got to everything there's a table three

    on page four that shows the breakdown of

    each of the five teachers like what they

    did and what they did not do in the

    different modules or units but basically

    one teacher got to everything another

    teacher got to all but one things a

    third teacher got to all but two things

    the fourth teacher got to all but four

    things and then a fifth teacher got two

    all but five things but each one of them

    was different results from the teaching

    strategy and pedagogy teachers tried a

    few different approaches so they did

    unplugged activities they did pair

    programming they did culturally relevant

    pedagogy which i kind of wanted to know

    more about i know that authors were

    compressed for space having also written

    for this conference this year trying to

    condense complicated ideas down into a

    few pages not easy to do so i'm curious

    what specifically the pedagogies look

    like and how they're implemented okay so

    the next subsection of results was on

    teacher professional learning experience

    so the authors discussed the co-design

    for community building the teachers

    liked that the district leads were

    brought into the meetings and it helped

    with communication across the entire

    team which i agree like if you check out

    the interview that i did with

    leandelizer we talk about script and

    cs4all and how in script that process

    brings together teachers with admin and

    various stakeholders to the table to all

    collaboratively discuss an

    implementation plan and some like goals

    so it's extremely important to have not

    just the admin on board or not just the

    teachers on board you have to have a

    variety of stakeholders present in the

    planning and in this case in the

    curriculum planning and development so i

    was happy to see that they did that and

    then having the ongoing meetings it

    sounded like the teachers really found

    that beneficial whether it was like the

    group meetings or the one-on-one

    meetings those were all beneficial for

    the development process which is smart

    makes sense to me to do that so teachers

    in this process all felt

    supported in terms of their teacher

    learning and the implementation as so

    that they were able to learn from each

    other bring some ideas to the table and

    then bring it back to their classroom

    this obviously led to some

    implementation outcomes and challenges

    that differed among the teachers because

    they were all implementing differently

    most likely from pandemic issues but

    they walked away impressed with how well

    their students were doing with what they

    were able to implement the challenges

    that they mentioned that they

    experienced a lot of them had to do with

    remote teaching in 2020 this was new for

    a lot of people as they weren't able to

    necessarily assess engagement and

    monitor learning processes over time

    virtually especially if like students

    turn off their camera and mics and then

    especially if you're trying to do some

    unplugged activities and then organizing

    pair programming remotely those can be

    difficult to do an interesting challenge

    that they mentioned is that even though

    there was support for the project the

    technology did not necessarily align

    with that support google classrooms had

    some issues where it did not allow

    teachers to integrate it with their

    google classroom in each district so

    like due to district settings or

    whatever it would prevent or block

    access which having been there and done

    that i know how frustrating that can be

    like i had one of the classes i was

    taking at asu it was blocked by my

    district so i could not look at or do my

    homework on my lunch break and whatnot

    it was frustrating they didn't even give

    us like an override like they didn't

    trust the teachers with passwords to you

    know be able to log into your class

    website or the university in town it was

    weird now in terms of student results so

    the third question so

    students had a statistically significant

    increase with a medium effect size and

    their confidence in creating their own

    apps but for this example they did not

    have a statistically significant

    increase in the confidence in coding or

    programming and the confidence in

    creating their own apps to help others

    even though there was an increase it

    wasn't statistically significant right

    so then the paper ends with a summary

    and discussion which you can check out

    if you're interested in it alright so at

    the end of these unpacking scholarship

    episodes i'd like to kind of provide

    some lingering questions or thoughts so

    one of them is how might you collaborate

    with other researchers or teachers by

    developing your own rpp what might that

    look like would it be an nsf grant

    proposal like the cs4 rpp believe those

    are usually in february for the

    deadlines so fi if you're interested in

    starting one reach out to me and i'm

    happy to talk participated in a couple

    so if you're a researcher cool maybe

    reach out to some local teachers your

    teacher maybe reach out to your alma

    mater or local research institutions

    whether that's a university setting or

    an independent organization or

    non-profit see if there are some rpps

    that you could create but outside of the

    rpp design what kind of co-design

    processes might you engage in with other

    cs educators and how might you do that

    like maybe you could reach out to other

    educators on cs for all teachers or

    other researchers at cs4l's website or

    use csta's virtual communities to

    collaborate with other people

    asynchronously what could you

    collaboratively design and share with

    the community i personally have a

    history of just kind of doing my own

    thing and sharing what i create on my

    website which is why there's like

    hundreds if not thousands of free cs

    resources on there a lot of it from when

    i was in the classroom and then now from

    working at boot up for the last few

    years so maybe you do it on your own and

    just share it or maybe you collaborate

    with others that's up to you overall

    though i really like the idea of having

    the co-design process for developing

    curriculum materials rather than just

    having just a curriculum developer

    credit or just a researcher having

    developers researchers and teachers all

    work together i think is a good idea but

    anyways this was a really interesting

    study to look at kind of bummed that

    covid happened and impacted things but i

    look forward to reading more projects

    like this stay tuned next week for

    another episode until then i hope you're

    all staying safe and are having a

    wonderful week

Article

Ni, L., Bausch, G., Feliciano, B., Hsu, H.-Y., & Martin, F. (2022). Teachers as curriculum co-designers: Supporting professional learning and curriculum implementation in a CSforAll RPP project. 2022 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 1–8.


Abstract

“This paper examines the use of collaborative curriculum design (co-design) as a strategy for supporting teacher professional learning and the implementation of an inclusive middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum in three urban school districts. The curriculum is focused on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. The second year of the project has been dedicated to developing and piloting curriculum resources that support remote learning and culturally relevant pedagogy while the partner districts switched to remote and hybrid instructions. This study explores teachers' professional learning experiences in the collaborative design of curriculum materials and piloting the curriculum in their own classrooms. The paper includes an analysis of three data sets: (1) co-design meeting notes and teacher reflections; (2) semi-structured interviews with teachers who co-designed and piloted the curriculum; (3) student pre- and post- survey responses on their attitude and interest in learning CSDL. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-on-one coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development process but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for implementing the project curriculum in the partner districts. Findings from student surveys show that students perceived their understanding of, and interest in computer science and creating apps were slightly improved, regardless of gender.”


Author Keywords

Middle school, computer science, curriculum co-design, teacher professional learning, RPP


My One Sentence Summary

This paper shares results of an RPP where teachers collaboratively designed an app development curriculum that they implemented in their classrooms


Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts

  • How might you collaborate with research/teachers by developing your own RPP?

  • What co-design processes might you engage in with other CS educators?


Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode



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